What is Best in Life for Children of the Privileged?

Back in the old days things were simple. What is best in life?

For a male chimpanzee: Get to the border with two of your pals and kill any chimp from another troop that shows up.

For a hunter-gatherer: Have a jolly good hunt, and, by the way, keep the other tribe on their side of the border?

For a medieval romance hero: Make sure it is your opponent's lance that shivers into splinters. And then head for bed and hope to wake up to discover some sweet damsel dressed in green samite bathing your face in her tears.

For Conan the Barbarian: To drive his enemies before him and hear the lamentation of their women.

For a feudal aristocrat: To boldly outdare the dangers of the time and get to wear that kingly crown.

For a post-feudal aristocrat: Get a seat in the House of Commons and make a name for yourself.

For the sons of the bourgeoisie: Become a lefty activist, like Marx and Engels and Horkheimer and Marcuse and Bill Ayers.

And now this kid, one of a generation of "Liberal Children of Privilege" that are having a grand old time acting like the tribunes of the marginalized.

[Carlos] Maza, who goes by the name “gay wonk,” is known for whining about people who’ve earned a lot of money and trying to “cancel” conservatives for making fun of him.

HIs mother and her fiance made millions with a software startup. So the kid has plenty of money to get on social media and "cancel" people.

Actually, I think that this highlights the Great Problem of this age, and indeed all previous ages.

Whatabout the children of the rich and powerful?

We all know that What is Best in Life for Conan the Barbarian. But whatabout his son? Yeah! You ever thought about his problem? What does he do, given that his dad already did all the enemy-driving and lamentation-of-women stuff?

In The Millionaire Next Door social scientists Stanley and Danko proposed that what millionaire moms do is they send their kids into the well-paid professions, like doctors and lawyers, because to repeat the millionaire success of dad goes against the odds. And, of course, that solid professional life starts with the most selective college possible.

But obviously the hands-down favorite for rich kids is to become a lefty activist. And it obviously appeals to the young: see the Bernie Bros and the enthusiasm of lefty college activists to descend on their cancel victim of the day. Like that girl student who dared, dared to say that socialism was more deadly than the Wuhan Flu. Well, the activists taught her a lesson!

But let us be serious, for a change. Our era is a revolutionary era, meaning that in the last 200 years we have utterly transformed society from agriculture to industry. And now, it seems from industry to the knowledge game.

In the old days the future of rich kids was clear. You inherited the lands of your father; you made a good marriage; you jostled with the other grandees at Court. Second sons and daughters, of course, had a harder time of it.

But now the war cray is "to become creative." An artist, a writer, an activist. It all sounds pretty straight forward, only it ain't.

The problem is that the whole point of being Gentry or being a People of the Creative Self is that just having a good job, good marriage, home and kids is not good enough for someone that wants to differentiate himself or herself from ordinary Commoners. Gentry kids want to be something special.

Only, being something special is really hard.

Here's the deal. And the philosophers and psychologists and mythologists are pretty clear on this.

To be a shooting star, a Hero, means becoming not just a tin-pot dictator or social-media "cancel" artist. It means being a Sacrificial Hero. It starts with the perilous journey into the underworld of the unconscious, from which you probably won't return. And if you do return from a successful encounter then, following Joseph Campbell, you may indeed return with a "Boon" for mankind.

"The Ultimate Boon" is the benefit, favor, or blessing that is bestowed on the hero figure. There is a drive for the hero to share the boon with humankind, whether it is an elixir of immortality, a holy grail, true love, perfect knowledge, or the meaning of life.

Or, in the version from Jordan B. Peterson, you return as the Sacrifical Hero, dying on the border between Order and Chaos while converting a small area of unknown Chaos into known Order.

Or, you become Nietzsche's Übermensch and that means stepping out of the "herd" and daring to go where no man dared to go before, stripped of all the comforts of home and the swaddling blankets of religion.

In other words, a real creative life is not Sunday in the park. It is a confrontation with demons; it is being "stressed" to the limit. It is to submit yourself to the Ultimate Truth -- and certainly not submit other people to your Ultimate Truth.

And that is one of the reasons I say that everything about the Left is a lie, including "and" and "the." In the narrative of the left the Noble Activist gets to bend the arc of history towards justice and the activist or the progressive politician, participating, as AOC recently said, in a mass movement.

No it ain't. They lied to you, honey.